Hidden connections
Where unrelated things turn out to meet.
“Can machines think?”: Turing’s 1950 question
Alan Turing opened a 1950 paper with that question, then replaced it with a test, and answered Ada Lovelace by name.
“Kazakh” and “Cossack” are the same word
The name of the Kazakh people most likely means a free wanderer, and the Cossacks of Ukraine and Russia share the same root.
A Hollywood star patented a secret radio system
In 1942 the film actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil patented a frequency-hopping system for guiding torpedoes. The Navy shelved it, but its principle lives on in modern wireless technology.
A noodle dish whose name has 58 strokes
Xi’an’s wide, hand-pulled biangbiang noodles are written with one of the most complex Chinese characters in use. It wasn’t in any dictionary, and only entered Unicode in 2020.
A skateboard, a bottle of juice, and a 43-year-old hit
In 2020 a man skateboarded to work drinking cranberry juice and lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac. The video sent “Dreams”, released in 1977, back into the US Top 20.
A slime mould designed the Tokyo rail network
Scientists put oat flakes where Tokyo’s cities are. A brainless single-celled organism grew a network remarkably like the real railway.
A volcano gave us Frankenstein
A massive eruption in Indonesia in 1815 caused a cold, stormy summer in Switzerland, which kept a group of writers indoors telling ghost stories.
AI got its name from a summer workshop proposal
In 1955 four researchers asked for funding for “a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence”, confident they could make a significant advance in one summer.
AI has gone through “winters” before
In 1970 a founder of AI predicted human-level machines within three to eight years. Within a few years funding collapsed, and it collapsed again in the late 1980s.
An 18-year-old’s failed medicine set off a fashion craze
In 1856 a student trying to make a malaria drug produced a purple stain instead, and within two years Europe was wearing mauve.
Before 1492, Italy had no tomatoes and Thailand had no chillies
Many “ancient” national dishes depend on ingredients that crossed the Atlantic after Columbus. Some of them are surprisingly recent.
Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness
In 1972 Bhutan’s young king declared that happiness mattered more than GDP. The idea reached the UN, and also attracted serious criticism.
Chekhov’s gun: what the quote really said
Every writer knows the rule that a gun on the wall must go off. The sources say it was spread across three different remarks.
Chesterton’s fence: ask why it’s there before you tear it down
A 1929 essay gave us one of the most useful rules for anyone who wants to change something: understand it first.
China owns nearly every giant panda on Earth
The pandas in zoos from Washington to Vienna are on loan. China charges rent, and even cubs born abroad belong to Beijing.
China spans five time zones but uses one
All of China runs on Beijing time. In the far west, the sun can rise after 10 a.m. in winter, so many people unofficially keep their own clock.
Computers began as looms
The first machine controlled by punched cards was not a calculator. It wove silk.
Do skirts really get shorter when the economy booms?
The “hemline index” says hemlines rise with stock prices. It’s usually credited to an economist in 1926, who didn’t actually propose it.
Does listening to Mozart make you smarter?
A small 1993 experiment about spatial puzzles turned into the belief that Mozart makes babies clever. The science never said that.
Every apple you have eaten comes from Kazakhstan
The main wild ancestor of the domestic apple still grows in forests in the mountains around Almaty, a city whose name is often linked to the Kazakh word for apple.
Fibonacci’s real legacy wasn’t the sequence
The rabbit puzzle made him famous, but Fibonacci’s real impact was teaching Europe to write numbers the way we do now.
From a bedroom GPU to ChatGPT
In 2012 a neural network trained on two gaming graphics cards in a student’s bedroom crushed an image-recognition contest. Ten years later, chatbots built on the same lineage reached the public.
General Tso’s chicken is unknown in General Tso’s home province
America’s favourite Chinese takeaway dish was invented in Taiwan, sweetened in New York, and was too sweet to sell in Hunan.
How a meat-eater’s body survives on bamboo
The giant panda is a bear with a carnivore’s gut, eating a plant it can barely digest. It survives by eating almost constantly and spending almost no energy.
How trends spread, from royal courts to TikTok
For a century, the theory was that fashion trickled down from the rich. Then it started bubbling up from the street, and now it moves sideways through algorithms in weeks.
In 1958 the Navy said its neural network would one day be conscious
The first trainable neural network, the perceptron, was announced as the embryo of a computer that would “walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence”.
In a Kazakh home, a half-empty cup is a compliment
Kazakh hosts pour tea only part-way, so they can keep refilling it while you stay and talk. A cup filled to the brim can be a polite hint.
Japan learned curry from the British Navy
Japanese curry came from India by way of the British, was adopted by the Japanese navy to fight a deadly vitamin deficiency, and is still served on navy ships every Friday.
Jesus was probably born “Before Christ”
The AD system was invented in 525 by a monk who got the date slightly wrong. Most historians place Jesus’s birth around 6–4 BC.
Kazakh has been written in three alphabets in a century
Kazakh moved from Arabic script to Latin in 1929, to Cyrillic in 1940, and is moving back to Latin today. Kazakhs in China still use the Arabic script.
Kazakh names that tell a story
A girl named Ulbolsyn carries a message: “let the next one be a boy”. Traditional Kazakh names record wishes, fears, wars and the day a child was born.
Kazakhstan brought half of a dying sea back to life
The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest lake. Soviet irrigation drained it into a desert, but a dam built by Kazakhstan in 2005 revived its northern part, and the fish came back.
Leonardo’s math teacher wrote the first guide to accounting
The friar who taught Leonardo da Vinci mathematics also published the first printed guide to double-entry bookkeeping, the system nearly every company still uses.
One of the oldest faiths, and Freddie Mercury’s
Zoroastrianism was once the state religion of Persian empires. Today it has perhaps 100,000–200,000 followers, among them the Parsi community into which Freddie Mercury was born.
Palindromes are written into your DNA
“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama” has a molecular cousin: your genome is full of sequences that read the same in both directions.
Pink for girls and blue for boys is younger than your grandparents
A century ago a trade magazine told shops that pink was for boys. The colour code we treat as ancient only settled in the mid-20th century.
Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson”
The most famous line in detective fiction is not in any of Conan Doyle’s stories, though both halves of it are.
Sichuan pepper makes your lips buzz at 50 Hz
It isn’t a pepper and it isn’t hot. It makes your mouth tingle, and researchers found the tingling feels like a vibration of about 50 times a second.
Spicy isn’t a taste. It’s pain.
Chilli “heat” triggers the same receptor that detects a burn. Birds can’t feel it, and that seems to be the point.
Tea if by sea, chai if by land
Almost every language calls tea either “te” or “cha”, and which one it uses depends on how tea first arrived: by Dutch ship or by overland trade.
Tempura was brought to Japan by the Portuguese
One of Japan’s most iconic dishes arrived with Portuguese missionaries and traders in the 16th century, and its name may come from Latin.
The “last wild horse” descends from tamed horses of the Kazakh steppe
5,500 years ago, people at Botai in northern Kazakhstan were bridling horses and probably milking mares. Their horses’ descendants became Przewalski’s horse, long thought to be truly wild.
The 1960s chatbot people confided in
ELIZA just reflected your words back as questions. Its creator’s secretary still asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private.
The arch that hangs upside down
Hang a chain from two points, photograph it, flip the picture, and you have the ideal shape for an arch.
The Bechdel test began as a joke in a comic strip
Three simple questions about a film started life in 1985, and the woman who thought of them wasn’t Alison Bechdel.
The chess-playing machine that had a man inside
From 1770, a turbaned mechanical figure beat players across Europe and America at chess. It was a brilliant hoax, and Amazon named a service after it.
The city in Kazakhstan that provoked Genghis Khan
In 1218 the governor of Otrar, a Silk Road city in today’s southern Kazakhstan, executed a Mongol trade caravan. The insult launched one of the most destructive invasions in history.
The cobra effect: when rewards backfire
Pay people to kill pests and some of them will start breeding pests. The famous cobra version may be a legend, but the rat version in Hanoi really happened.
The country that gave up the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal
The Soviet Union set off 456 nuclear explosions in Kazakhstan. After independence, Kazakhstan closed the test site and gave up about 1,400 nuclear warheads.
The devil’s interval was never banned
The tritone is said to have been outlawed by the medieval Church as ‘the devil in music’. The phrase is real, but the ban looks like a story that grew in the retelling.
The dream of thinking machines is thousands of years old
Long before computers, people imagined bronze giants, reasoning wheels and a language in which arguments could be settled by calculation.
The first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter
In 1843, a century before electronic computers, Ada Lovelace wrote out a program and imagined machines making music.
The first human in space took off from Kazakhstan
Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin both launched from Baikonur, on the Kazakh steppe. Today Russia rents the cosmodrome, and the town around it, from Kazakhstan.
The Kazakh bride who renames her husband’s family
By custom, a Kazakh daughter-in-law does not say the names of her husband’s elder relatives aloud. Instead she invents a respectful nickname for each one.
The man who decided the missiles weren’t real
In 1983 a Soviet early-warning system reported five American nuclear missiles on their way. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, judged it a false alarm, and he was right.
The novel with no letter E
In 1969 Georges Perec wrote a whole French novel without using the most common letter in the language. Then someone translated it into English, keeping the rule.
The same face, three different emotions
A 1920s Soviet experiment showed that audiences read emotion into an actor’s blank face, depending on the shot that came before it.
The Sator Square
A five-word Latin puzzle scratched on a wall in Pompeii reads the same in four directions. Nobody agrees on what it means.
The scream that has been in hundreds of films
One man’s scream, recorded for a 1951 western, turns up in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It is named after a character who barely appears.
The snail in the ginger beer
A woman in Paisley, a bottle of ginger beer and a snail that was never proved to exist became the case on which the modern law of negligence rests.
The spandrel: a by-product that looks like a purpose
Not every feature of a living thing was ‘designed’ for a job. Two biologists borrowed a word from cathedral builders to make the point, and then architects argued about whether they had the cathedral right.
The veil of ignorance
Design a society without knowing which person in it you will be, and watch what changes.
The Victorian internet
Long before email, the telegraph gave the 19th century online romance, hackers, slang and information overload.
Tulips are Central Asian, not Dutch
Long before the Netherlands made them famous, tulips were wild flowers of the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains, where many species still bloom every spring.
Umami: the taste discovered in a bowl of soup
In 1908 a Japanese chemist wondered why his wife’s seaweed broth tasted so good, and identified a fifth basic taste.
Who lives in Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter
In the heart of an ancient Chinese capital is a mosque that looks like a Buddhist temple, run by a Muslim people descended partly from Silk Road traders.
Why many Kazakhs can name seven generations of ancestors
A Kazakh child is traditionally expected to know seven fathers back, and the rule exists to prevent marriage between relatives.
Why Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier every year
The Islamic calendar follows the moon, not the sun, so Ramadan travels through every season in about 33 years.
Why your parents’ clothes look ridiculous, and your grandparents’ look charming
In 1937 a museum curator mapped how we feel about a style over time: “indecent” ten years early, “hideous” ten years late, “charming” after seventy.
Xi’an was once one of the largest cities on Earth
Around 750, the city now called Xi’an was Chang’an: a “million-man city” at the eastern end of the Silk Road, home to Persians, Sogdians, Arabs and Christian monks.